19 Aug
2013
19 Aug
'13
1:16 p.m.
On 17/08/2013 20:02, Tony Duell wrote:
And related to the microcontroller usage Inmos was of course purchased
by SGS-Thomson, now ST micro. The Transputer core (with just one link
for boot/debug) was used in a long line of digital TV SOC designs. The
CPU core became known as the ST20 and last time time I got involved in
this area a few years ago it was still being used in entry level chips.
Even on high-end chips variants of the ST20 make appearance as an
embedded controller for other SOC functions. I don't have the figures
but I know most set top boxes for a very long time used some variant of
ST20 so I'd guess in the 10's of millions. The sad fact is that most
engineers in the industry used a C toolset and knew it as the ST20 and
had no idea that a Transputer was at the core (even sadder is many young
engineers have no idea what a Transputer is!). I had the delightful job
of coding a JIT compiler for the ST20 so was very aware of the
Transputer heritage :-)
The ST20 was being replaced at the high end by the ST40 (SH-4), at the
low end by the ST200 (VLIW - confusingly VL in this case is Very Long,
rather than the ST20s Variable Length. Co-designed by HP I believe) and
of course ARM is taking over everything.
Ironic really that is was the Transputer that captivated my imagination
at school and shaped my choice of University degree. I never did get to
use the Transputer for real but I programmed set top boxes based on
ST20s for many years. I also have a rack of over 300 T425s in the garage
that one day I'll do something interesting with (render Z=Z*Z+C probably ;)
There's a few of us that still have a soft spot for Transputers. We
probably all roll our eyes as multi-core processing is (re-)invented
many times over.
James
The Transputer
was actually a very simple and elegant design -- and very
Yes. I used a couple for
my Ph.D. work and I've yet to see a processor
that is easier to interface or program.
I feel that they were intially mis-marketed. They were pushed as a
processr for doing parallel processing (which in a sense is true) with
the result that peopel ignored them becuase they didn't need to do
parallel processing. In fact ther wrre a very nice _microcontroller_.
They were almost ideal for high-performance embedded systems -- like
fast data acquistion devices (what I used them for) and the like.
fast for its time. Not sure that the x86 family
can claim the same.
:-)
-tony